Are you asking a question because you want to know the answer or are you asking the question because you want your partner to know that you are having this question?
In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, “Whew, at last I’m in a place where I don’t have to worry,” or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.
You never know your partner as well as you think.
In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.
There’s something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is.
When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.
Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.
Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.
Women – – and men – – need to understand that a woman’s transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself.
We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.
Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.
Today, monogamy is one person at a time.
Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.
We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.
Monogamy, it follows, is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it is the marker of our specialness: I have been chosen and others renounced. When you turn your back on other loves, you confirm my uniqueness; when your hand or mind wanders, my importance is shattered. Conversely, if I no longer feel special, my own hands and mind tingle with curiosity. The disillusioned are prone to roam. Might someone else restore my significance.
It’s hard to experience desire when you’re weighted down by concern.
Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness.
The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.